How to Crash and Burn your Java project

A fly on the wall perspective on the strange things project teams do to ensure that their Java project never manages to deliver anything useful.

The most important thing you have to do in order to crash and burn your Java
project is to ensure that nobody who knows anything about OO design gets to
work on the project. The easiest way to do this is to hire cheap, fresh out
of school "Java wannabe" programmers and give the design job to someone
who has never delivered an OO application. If that strategy fails and you get
given a real designer make sure that some really junior programmers are assigned
the task of "assisting with the design". If you do this really well
your designer will be too busy helping the juniors to actually manage to do
any design.

Make sure that you start the project with a really big team from day 1. After
all, we all know that adding people to a late project makes it later, so we
should start with a big team right from the start. A big team also mitigates
the problem of losing people as the project progresses, so the best plan is
to over-staff at the start, allowing natural attrition to reduce the team to
the optimum size by the end of the project.

Starting with a really big team also helps prevent any real OO design from happening,
after all with all those developers you have to start coding as early as possible.
The earlier we can start coding the earlier the project will be finished.
To add a bit of excitement to this mix make sure that the requirements are vague.
The best way to do this is to create a really thick functional specification
containing lots and lots of detail about how the application is supposed to
work. The trick to making this work is to ensure that this 1,000 page "tree-killer"
doesn’t contain any information about what the overall purpose of the application
is or the business justification behind the application. After all that kind
of information is too high level for mere programmers to be interested in.

If someone has the temerity to suggest that using Use Cases would be a better
way of documenting the requirements, make sure that the Use Cases get written
after the functional specification is complete. After all your users are familiar
with functional specifications, so first the team must give them what they are
familiar with and only then can they waste time on creating these new fangled
Use Cases. For added fun make sure that everyone who gets involved in writing
these Use Cases uses a different style. This is easier than it sounds, all you
have to do is buy one of each Use Case book and make sure that each analyst
is given an office next to their users who you have thoughtfully loaned one
of your Use Case books to.

Having handled the requirements capture process you now have to turn your attention
to the application architecture. If you already have a corporate application
architecture then your best bet is to make a case that your project is special
and needs to use a different application architecture. Select your best designers
and programmers and give them a free hand to investigate alternatives. Make
sure that they write up their recommendations in the form of a white paper.
Once this is in place the rest of your team can ignore the corporate application
architecture and do whatever they want to do. When the white paper is eventually
ready, even if the recommendation is rejected it will be too late to change
all of the code that has already been developed.

If you do not already have a corporate application architecture you are safe.
Either roll your own infrastructure or select a bleeding edge vendor. Bleeding
edge vendors are best because by the time your application is ready the infrastructure
will be stable and state of the art. Make sure that you consider all possible
vendors and have your complete evaluation process documented before you start
so that nobody can say that the selection process was biased.

Rolling your own infrastructure can also be a winning strategy because these
frameworks are not all that complex and you could always sell it to other companies
when you are finished. It’s also a great way to use up your highly skilled
talent on the project.

With requirements and architecture sorted you now need to turn your attention
to the real developers who will be writing your application. Even though you
have hired cheap you want to make your team believe that they are the best individual
developers in the world. To do this encourage them to display their creativity
and intelligence through the code that they write. Also, if any of them have
the temerity to ask for a course you can squash that heresy immediately by implying
that "if you can't get it out of a book, you must be stupid". This
of course helps the entire team think that they are really brilliant and your
attitude will prevent genuainely good developers from ever staying long enough
to dispel the myth that you are creating.

To encourage developers to creatively express themselves through their code
you need to ensure that you have an immensely detailed coding standard. Rather
than stifle creativity by insisting on a single placement of braces, let each
developer choose a construct and let them define that part of the coding standard.
This avoids all those unproductive hours of arguing about the one true brace
style and allows every developer to put their stamp on the coding standards.
Do the same thing for comments, naming conventions etc., until you have a 200+
page coding standard. Circulate the resulting document throughout the company
and set up a mailing list for discussions and feedback because meetings would
be much too much of a drag on the project. Encourage flame wars on this mailing
list as having an emotional outlet is healthy for the team.

Since code reviews are harmful to the creative expression of individuality by
programmers avoid them if at all possible. If you have to do code reviews you
must ignore all of the feedback from them. Even if there is a list of items
requiring changes, postpone working on that code because it’s much more
important that you add more new features to the application.

Remember all that stuff about "encapsulation" that OO books talk about?
Don’t touch it. Private methods make it impossible to use inheritance.
Ideally everything should be public so that it can be accessed in the most efficient
manner. The other problem with encapsulation is that forces developers to write
lots of inefficient little methods that are scattered across lots of different
classes. To add a simple feature developers have to modify lots of different
files and even with the best will in the world it’s easy to make a mistake
when modifying lots of files. The best place to put all of the code is either
behind the OK button (you only have to go to one place to see what is happening)
or in stored procedures in the database (since these give optimal database performance).

The last thing you have to remember is that developers always over estimate
the time they need to write the code. You need to question all estimates and
make every developer justify why they need to take that long. A good put down
line to use is "I’ve written more complex things in half the time."
If any developer is unwilling to reduce their estimates find them a much simpler
task that even they can do and give their work to a real programmer.